A figure in a floor-length red fur coat stands in a yellow room. Not a room with yellow walls — a room that is yellow the way a swimming pool is blue, floor and walls and ceiling all the same chrome yellow, with a square hole cut in the ceiling through which we see actual sky: blue, with two very convincing cumulus clouds. Black gloves, black pointed boots, a hard shadow thrown across the right-hand wall.
Red against yellow is the loudest pairing available and nobody reaches for it unless they mean it. The coat is enormous, sweeping the floor and swallowing the arms, and inside it the figure is doing something oddly delicate with the hands: one held out flat and away, as though steadying against a wall that is not there, the other gathering the coat at the waist. The head is turned down and to the side, away from the light. It is a gesture of balancing rather than of posing.
What I cannot get past is the square of sky. It is the only thing in the picture that was not painted or dyed or built, and it has been reduced to the same status as everything else — a rectangle of colour on a ceiling, no more real than the yellow. In a photograph, real sky and a photograph of sky are indistinguishable, which is the sort of observation that sounds profound at two in the morning and happens also to be true. Somebody cut a hole to let the world in, and the world arrived looking exactly like set dressing.
A figure in a floor-length red fur coat stands in a yellow room. Not a room with yellow walls — a room that is yellow the way a swimming pool is blue, floor and walls and ceiling all the same chrome yellow, with a square hole cut in the ceiling through which we see actual sky: blue, with two very convincing cumulus clouds. Black gloves, black pointed boots, a hard shadow thrown across the right-hand wall.
Red against yellow is the loudest pairing available and nobody reaches for it unless they mean it. The coat is enormous, sweeping the floor and swallowing the arms, and inside it the figure is doing something oddly delicate with the hands: one held out flat and away, as though steadying against a wall that is not there, the other gathering the coat at the waist. The head is turned down and to the side, away from the light. It is a gesture of balancing rather than of posing.
What I cannot get past is the square of sky. It is the only thing in the picture that was not painted or dyed or built, and it has been reduced to the same status as everything else — a rectangle of colour on a ceiling, no more real than the yellow. In a photograph, real sky and a photograph of sky are indistinguishable, which is the sort of observation that sounds profound at two in the morning and happens also to be true. Somebody cut a hole to let the world in, and the world arrived looking exactly like set dressing.